The book starts, introducing Sarah, who tells us a horrible episode she lived personally.
One night while she was sleeping, she heard one of her flatmates, Heidi, coming with a man she had picked up in a pub. Apart from Sarah, there were two other girls. Then Sarah hears Heidi scream, and she describes a horrible slaughter of Heidi and her two other flatmates, but she managed to survive.
In the next chapter DD has to change her plans with her family because there has been a murder. On reaching the place, she learns that there are several bodies, and a whole family has been shot dead. There is Charlie Boyd, who was shot in the living room, Juanita Baez, shot while she was putting the groceries away, and upstairs the two younger children, Lola and Manny, were hugging when the killer hit them. DD learns that there is a third girl, Roxanna, who is missing as well as the family's two blind dogs. Juanita is a nurse and a former alcoholic, who lost custody of her children for one year because of her drinking, but now she has sobered up. Manny, her youngest, is the son of Hector, a barman who also had drinking problems, and the man tells DD that he had to leave Juanita because the situation was unbearable. Lola and Roxy have different fathers.
DD wonders whether Roxy may have murdered her mother and stepfather, and the reason why. The neighbours heard the shots, and only one of them saw Roxy leaving the house with the two dogs and taking a rucksack that she had hidden in the garden. This was some time before the shooting, but DD wonders that maybe the girl returned.
The dogs are found in a park, and Roxy left a note in the dogs' collars, asking to be cared for. There is a second narrator in the novel, Flora, who was the girl who was kidnapped and kept captive for a long time and helped in a previous book to rescue another kidnapped girl. Flora tells DD that she has created an online support group for survivors, and Roxanna was one of the people who belonged to the board. We know that Roxanna went to find Sarah, the girl from the first chapter, and claimed that she needed help for a friend, and she introduced her to the supporting group run by Flora. Sarah thought that Roxy's friend was not real, and the one who had problems was her. Flora thinks that the girl is very afraid, and she intends to find her.
Everybody who either DD or Flora talk to is positive that Roxy can't have killed her family as she was shy, responsible and incapable of doing something like that. Flora talks to the school counsellor, who tells her that Roxy had a lot of pressure because every morning she had to make sure her siblings went to school as her mother worked the night shift. The counsellor feels that Roxy was worried about her sister, Lola, who was a beauty and might have started to go with a gang.
DD talks to one of Juanita's colleagues, who is also full of praise for Roxy, and she tells her that Juanita was worried about Lola after the girl made sexual comments to her teacher in front of the whole class. Juanita thought that Lola changed after her stay in the foster home, and she even talked to a lawyer about how to sue the state for the damage they had done. Yet, it seems that the girls refused to tell their mother that anything untoward had happened.
DD then receives a call from her colleague Phil, saying that there has been another shooting, this time in Manny's father's home, and apparently, a girl responding to Roxy's description was seen leaving the place.
This book has already grabbed my attention, and I am eager to discover who killed the whole family and why Roxy is now running away.
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